I turned 31 on Friday, so the weekend was spent celebrating with family. The birthday itself was pretty nondescript; I was recovering from a flu-ey virus thing that sent my temperature through the roof, so a quiet weekend of leisurely strolls was perfect.

Jacob has started taking his first solo steps, which is exciting and scary in equal measure. For someone so short, he looks a long way from the ground when he walks.

Work has been an interesting mix of divergence and convergence. We’re deploying tactical fixes whilst big picture thinking about the next quarter. Our project has taken a trip round the Hero’s journey and it’s time to strap on our brave boots and venture off into the unknown again.

Wednesday provided yet another change of pace where I donned my latest Utopia t-shirt and spent the day locked in a boardroom discussing how we’re going to bring some fluid goodness to our internal design system. Again, it was a combination of nitty-gritty details where we prototyped different base units in Figma & code, alongside broad discussions around semantic spaces and how to encourage adoption. I left with a full heart and an empty head.

In side project news, I migrated both Utopia Figma plugins over to a plugin schema and blogged about it. I also posted about reverse engineering, a subject I was thinking about when preparing my last talk. I also made some CSS tweaks to my website, widening the content width, tweaking the type scale, and re-writing the home page intro copy.

Day 2

Day 3

I’ve been working on a side project/tool during work hours, and it’s beginning to take shape. I can’t say much more than that right now, not that it’s a secret, it’s more a case of as we start to use it, the product is turning into an entirely different beast. I can’t currently articulate it in a single sentence, so that probably needs to happen before I blog about it.

Watching friends succeeding in their work is such a joy. I went to Liam’s to discuss an API integration and it was so cool to see all the amazing work he’s creating in Webflow! On Tuesday evening, Cassie presented a Smashing Magazine webinar on Interactive SVG - it was mega inspiring, thoughtfully prepared and brilliantly executed!

I got rather upset with printers on Tuesday evening but after wine, time and some buried drivers, it sorted itself out.

Wednesday was bonkers. My brother was heading up to Oxford, so I dropped him at the train station at silly o’clock before pottering down to work. The morning was spent writing a blog post on linear interpolation functions. It’s the first ‘proper’ post I’ve done in a while, and it felt great to write something longer-form than these weeknotes. Mum & Dad then popped down to Brighton and we had lunch together.

Then in the evening, I was invited to a planning meeting for a trip to Athens. A group from church went out last year and they’re going again in September. Following some drop-outs, a spot has become available and my name was put forward! By Thursday morning, my annual leave was organised and I was signed up. This is most out of character for me, and yet I’m genuinely not feeling anxious right now - which I guess is a good sign!

I mean, I only got an hours sleep that night, but it wasn’t anxiety - my brain had just gone into overdrive! The lack of sleep made productivity on Thursday a bit of a challenge. The trip does mean missing the wonderful State of the browser which sucks - it was so good last year, and we’d got a group of seven going. Hey ho! They will have a great time, and I will too!

Homebrew website club was a huge success this week. Hana very kindly offered to help with the information architecture mess that is my blog. She got me to print out all the post titles onto cards - this tool was very handy. She then did a first-pass open card sort, grouping posts into sensible categories (ignoring the categories they are currently in). This exercise really brought to light how bad some of my post titles are, here are some choice cuts:

• Making some updates
• The recap
• Eulerplate

Any ideas what those posts are about? No, me either.

We then played around with the categories and posed many hypothetical content scenarios. It was properly fascinating, and really made me think about the content on my site, who it’s for, and how it can work harder.

Some amazing ideas were floated in the workshop, so I’ll need to weigh them, decide which are right and then make a bit of a backlog. It’s very exciting!

Photos of the week

Given the lack of recent weeknotes, here’s a few photos from the past month. Sidenote, I’d really like to organise imagery on my site better but that’s another IA task in itself!

Nymans

Lauren and I took a trip to Nymans earlier in the month. It’s so much fun doing photography with her! I can’t honestly remember who took which shots, we kept swapping between the two cameras with the 24-120mm and 105mm macro lenses.

London

I’ve been up to London a couple of times recently. Once to watch the Breathe Magic final show in the Magic Circle! Lauren volunteered for the fortnight; it was truly amazing to see how much they’d helped the kids.

Cassie and I also headed up for a work discussion and we took a trip to see the Dinosaurs. I was very excited.

Other shots

The first holiday activity was kayaking, a ‘sport’ I have not partaken in for many a year. It was tremendous fun, and I might’ve got the bug. I even went river swimming, wore a silly boy racer hat and then stupidly played squash afterwards. Photos taken by Alex - thanks!

Cake

I quite enjoy a good bake. I don’t have many culinary skills, but I’m not too bad at cakes, providing they are a variation on the classic Victoria sponge. I made a Passion Fruit and Orange cake for my sister’s birthday, and it went down rather well.

London

After a ridiculously early alarm call, Lauren and I went up to London. We parted ways at Elephant & Castle and I wandered through the city over to Daisie. It was great to head back and see the team - the last four months have flown by since leaving them.

I then met up with Tim (check out his snazzy new website) for lunch at St. Pauls. Following that, I wandered over to the Tate Modern for an afternoon of art - not something I usally do. It was really great - Naoya Hatakeyama’s series on the urban night lights of Tokyo was a particular highlight. I took a number of photographs on my phone, aiming to capture silhouettes in the museum and city.

Walking

City life does very little for me, I much prefer to be out in the silence of the sticks. I took the opportunity to go for a number of walks; sometimes several a day, just to get out and clear my head. The weather was pretty stunning all week, so most evenings would see a walk down the fields behind the village. It was lush.

Sheffield Park and cooking

Thursday was a chilled day of reading, walking, film watching and burger making. Solid.

Goodwood

It’s been several months since I went down to Goodwood. There was a Mustang track day, but to be honest it could’ve been anything. It was just nice to potter around, eat breakfast, look at some planes and cars, take a few snaps and head home!

Sheffield Park (again)

For the third time in the week, I went to Sheffield Park! National Trust’s are such good value on a young person’s ticket. My sister got a tripod for her birthday, so we went out to try it out. It’s been a while since I’ve taken a tripod on a walk, so I grabbed an ND filter and did some long exposures by the lake.

Running

I attended my second Parkrun, narrowly beating my PB. I reckon I set off too fast and paid the price near the end, but I made it! The day ended with another wander round the village.

Stoolball

Lauren was playing in the Sussex Stoolball tournament on Sunday, so I headed down to Seaford again to cheer them on! It was lots of fun!

There endeth my holiday snaps.

Band practice was a lot of fun on Monday night. I still dislike singing, but it’s getting easier and hopefully a little better.

I stayed up in Birmingham for two nights this week. Difficult to know if I felt more or less tired, but certainly better than going up and down in a day twice a week. Functional hotels are pretty bleak places. I have no desire to become a businessperson who stays away a lot.

We held another two data discovery workshops. It’s amazing how much can be enlightened with a design print out and a few sharpies. Also, I got grief for bringing my own sharpie, it appears Clearleft culture has become part of me!

I had some truly wonderful and spectacular personal news, but weeknotes aren’t the place to share them 😊

After a great dev meet, I was inspired to go for another run. I didn’t realise how long it had been since the last: 55 days. That’s pretty scary how much time has passed.

Photos of the week

Monday was go-live day for the project I worked on at the start of my Clearleft tenure, but due to a late confirmation and a lot content updates, the actual launch was pushed till Thursday and I spent a lot of Monday evening & Tuesday morning adding copy. There were also a number of meetings in preparation for Tuesday’s work.

Six of us jumped in a large taxi and headed to Surrey for a new project kickoff. I haven’t been in a non-dev kickoff here, so it was fascinating to watch the other disciplines spring into action and begin gathering project scope. It’s also a real privilege to see the inner workings and opinions of another company, observing their strengths and pain-points, and having the opportunity to put forward solutions. We had a very dicey journey back with a slightly lost taxi driver, so other than feeling a bit travel sick, the day went without a hitch.

I was back up in Birmingham on Wednesday to work on my primary project. I was working solo for the first few weeks, but now a number of their team have joined me on the project. It means answering more questions, code reviewing more and being in more meetings, but it’s really beneficial to the project as a whole. We held and impromptu Design -> API dissection workshop. Armed with highlighters and a printed design file, we interrogated each section, confirming where the data lived and how we’ll access it. It was a helpful exercise to shed light on the assumptions within the data.

It once again proved how dangerous tacit knowledge can be in a project. When you arrive late to a project, you often feel like a bit of a prune asking all the basic questions, but it’s amazing how many shadows get enlightened when you do so. The process of onboarding is a great litmus test of the codebase complexity.

Thursday involved a lot of meetings, getting the aforementioned website live, sitting in on an interview, and squash. It was the first game in two weeks and I really didn’t eat enough food beforehand. Fainting was on the cards but thankfully avoided.

Friday morning is a combo of stand-up, playback and retro rituals. Even the most concise ceremonies take up the morning, so I didn’t get a great deal done. After that followed code reviews and a stakeholder interview. It’s the first one I’ve sat in on, and was pretty fascinating.

Clearleft ran the annual mini-conference and client social on Friday afternoon. I wasn’t able to get to the conference, but a bunch of us geeked out for a few hours, which was rather pleasant.

There was an hour between the interview and the party - prime time for coding. It was wonderful. I got two stories completed and ended the week on a real high after days of context switching, meetings and code reviews.

Photos of the week

This week has been really positive. I’ve made cracking strides into the build of the client project. After two weeks of groundwork, we’re now motoring along! Most web projects feel a bit like a Keirin bike race; it’s the one in the Olympics where they follow a motorbike for a few laps, then go for a crazy sprint to the finish. You spend a lot of time slowly gathering pace and laying foundations and then BAM, you suddenly make swift progress. For the section I’m working on, I’ve hit that sprint phase - and it feels wonderful!

I was up in Birmingham to visit the client on Wednesday. I’m getting used to the journey; sure it’s a bit long and the pendolino are a bit sickness-inducing, but it’s pretty impressive to be able to do 10-5 in their office without an overnight stay.

Thursday night was the Patterns Day speaker’s dinner at Cin Cin - it was a lot of fun. Many bellini’s were drunk (by others) and much pasta was consumed (by me). It was the perfect pre-cursor to the conference on Friday. I was on photographic duties for the day. The Duke of York cinema is a tough venue to shoot in, what with it being a dark cinema, but I was pretty happy with the results. I went with the trusty 35mm 1.4 and 85mm 1.8 for the registration and breaks, and the 14-24mm 2.8 and 70-200mm 2.8 for the talks themselves.

Having not done conference photography like it before, and was really mindful to avoid being a distraction to the attendees and speakers. The aim was to get a handful of shots in the first minute with the telephoto, then a couple with the wide angle. I stayed in my seat and then put down the camera to enjoy the talk. The biggest problem was my laptop. The battery is aged, and there was no power by my seat. This left the generous 30 minute breaks to find power, get the shots edited and posted, and get outside to get some shots of the attendees chatting. Here’s a few shots from the event:

After a pretty nondescript Monday of general office admin, I was able to spend the remainder of the week making solid progress on the site build. It’s now hooked up to ElasticSearch and the live API, pulling in products and filtering to great effect.

There’s been a temptation to prematurely abstract various features, and it’s been a worthwhile task weighing them up to see which are worth pursuing.

In code and design, I think there’s a knack to spotting the difference between things that look similar, and things that are similar. You get it a lot in CSS. Three things may share the same value, but that doesn’t mean they will always do so, and in that case, grouping them keeps them tightly coupled. It’s a similar thing with the data fetching for these product filters. On the surface they look similar: pick one or more values from a list of things and send the UUID’s off to the API. But each one has intricacies and requirements that may mean a level of duplication is actually preferable. It’s a bit of a tightrope walk, but a fun one.

In other news, I ran a guitar workshop for the church band, played another three games of squash (and a rogue game of table tennis), and started reading “How to make sense of any mess”. My blog is getting unwieldy. It was only when talking through the category situation with Hana at Homebrew website club, that it became clear how much of a mess it has become. Hopefully this book will help shine a light!

The two biggest differences were: not thinking about buying a house, and getting properly started on the project at work. I reckon the former gave me the headspace to achieve the latter.

I don’t really care for project setup to be honest. Configuring tooling has never been a particular passion of mine. There’s definitely a ‘decision paralysis’ part of it in not wanting to commit to a decision before the problem scope has been fully uncovered. But I do enjoy project planning and system design, so maybe it’s just the tools I dislike… Anyway, I’m a much happier bunny once coding can commence, and that happened this week!

I’ve been working on the search results section of the site, which means pulling together many strands: pattern library components, ElasticSearch, API responses, pagination, stores and local caches, filters and data transformation. The plan is all coming together, and I’m writing a lot of documentation in the form of comments to explain the whys.

On Wednesday I took a trip up to Birmingham to join the client’s team. It’s a long way to go in a day, but was definitely worth the travel.

Other activities this week included three games of squash, which I think officially makes me a bore! I also went for a drink, in a pub, with a friend, which was most out of character for me.

There was also a bit of preperation time for an internal presentation we’ll be giving on Tuesday. The slide deck is ready, just need to gather a few more thoughts together!

Photos of the week

After much thought, I was ready to put an offer in on a flat on Tuesday, but got a call on Monday night to say it had been snapped up. Somewhat surprisingly, my reaction wasn’t one of regret or frustration, it was relief. The process had gone from 0 to 60 in the space of a week, and was beginning to feel like a runaway train. I’m sure that’s a pretty normal feeling for the frankly bonkers process of buying a house, but it was handy to have the brakes applied by an external force. I’m in a much stronger and more knowledgeable position now, so when the time does come, I’m hoping it won’t feel quite so insane.

Sleep (or a lack of) appears to be quite a good warning sign that life is too stressful, and sadly this week was quite sparse for decent shut-eye. It’s clear that I need to take more care of myself and drop some stress-inducing things pronto. It’s the knock-on effect during the day that’s most frustrating, running on fumes is rubbish and you end up being ratty - so apologies to my wonderful colleagues!

I won’t dwell too much on work things, other than to say it’s been another challenging week. Productive, but challenging. The playback at the end of the week went down well, and good project progress has been made, it has just felt like an uphill struggle (probably because of the sleep). I also need to start focusing on positives more; I’m naturally quite pessimistic so I have to work extra hard to spin that around. There’s a lot of amazing things happening, and I need to focus on them more and catch myself if I drift.

Seeing friends over the weekend and during the week really boosted the old spirits, as did hitting a squash ball rather hard on Thursday evening! Anyway, that’s plenty of rambling for a train journey home…

Photos of the week